by ·Comments Off on A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 (1989, Stephen Hopkins)

They’re done with sequel numbering, but I’m not – it’s part five. A few years ago I watched four and a half of these in a month, but as much as these movies repeat themselves, it’s better to put a year or two between them. Opening titles sex scene with our survivors from part four, hell yeah, but things are amiss – Alice almost gets showered to death, and has a backstory vision of Freddy’s birth story (a nun assaulted by an asylum full of maniacs). Freddy always “dies” convincingly then comes back inexplicably in the next one, and the gimmick here is he can visit Alice while she’s awake through the dreams of her unborn child.

Prince of Darkness this ain’t:

Alice has four friends with diverse interests, ideal for getting murdered in character-appropriate ways in the first half of a 90-minute movie. Generic Saved by the Bell-lookin’ Boyfriend Dan gets beat up by his self-driving car then Tetsuo-the-Iron-Man‘d by a Freddycycle… anorexic model Greta gets force-fed… Mark gets Take On Me-d into his comics… star diver Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter of Popcorn and Miracle Mile) actually lives, releasing the momma nun’s spirit (she’d been sitting long-dead in some abandoned church), then Alice’s baby uses vomit-attack on Freddy, who once again loses/frees the souls of dead high schoolers.

It’s slightly less goofy than the previous one, but no better. Has Freddy always called every woman bitch? Final showdown where Alice rescues her baby from Freddy on Escher-stairs feels like a Labyrinth ripoff. Hopkins had a good 1990s career, including Judgment Night. The writer did House III the same year, and was a member of Sparks. Rosenbaum raved: “zero-degree filmmaking … flaccid editing.”

You can tell a movie has no prestige when its blu-ray extras are just music videos by The Fat Boys and Whodini. The former is from Mondo director Harvey Keith, opens with a very awkward sketch, making me doubt my memories of the Fat Boys’ great acting talent in Disorderlies. The three then run around a very well-dilapidated movie house pursued by Freddy. Good use of movie clips in the song, and Englund gets to rap. The Whodini is a much better song, has twin dancing Freddies on a staircase, and the band wisely doesn’t go inside the horror house, just dances on the porch.

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China V (1994, Tsui Hark)

The stupidest, goofiest entry, thanks to the full line of disciples and family members from parts one through four being together for the first time – and also the most shootiest and explosionest. This time they’re fighting sea pirates, led by Elder Paco (a Yes Madam spinoff), Junior Stephen (Hard Boiled), and Elaine (The Bride with White Hair), and fortunately Katy didn’t watch this one (the pirates have an entire crate full of the severed fingers of their victims). It’s not as exciting as it sounds.

The gang:

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China IV (1993, Yuen Bun)

Pre-credits scene has Vincent Zhao making some very un-Jet-Li awesome moves, then his name is splashed across the screen – good, they’re not trying to hide the new guy. It’s also the first sequel to start directly after the previous one – they’re still celebrating the end of the Lion King festival when friendly Governor Zhiwen Wang (currently of the Infernal Affairs TV series) shows up and they lion-dance together.

Foon, Clubfoot, and Yan are back in the mix, but 13th Aunt is replaced by (Katy guessed it) 14th Aunt: Jean Wang of Swordsman III and Iron Monkey the same year. New director Yuen doesn’t exactly revitalize the series here. The dubbing is bad, and despite having a subplot about a group using wires to appear to fly, the movie itself is full of unintentionally visible wires, especially in the heinous horse-punching scenes (yes, there’s more than one).

14th Aunt starts a newspaper but nobody in town knows how to read – so, technologically we’ve moved from still photography to motion pictures to the printing press. Anti-foreigner sword cult Red Lantern is menacing everyone, and the foreigners have equipped their lion suits with deadly weapons. The nice governor dies, it’s very sad, then Wong takes a measured bit of revenge before withdrawing to prep for the final(?) movie.

Chin Ka-Lok is angry, I’ve forgotten why:

Ze Germans:

by ·Comments Off on Evangelion 3 & 4 (2012/2021, Hideaki Anno)

Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo (2012)

Where we left off, the movies were following the series pretty closely, except for one new character. That’s all out the window now, as Shinji awakens from a 14-year nap (but he’s the same age and temperament). He discovers all his friends are dead because he caused a mass extinction that destroyed most the world. But at least he rescued Rei – nope, this Rei is a soulless clone. But at leaast his coworkers are still supporting him – nope, they’ve formed an alliance to try to destroy him. But at least he makes an enthusiastic new friend – nope, a bomb collar blows that guy’s head off.

–
Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time (2021)

Shinji is in one of his dark quiet moods, but at least Fake Rei (a clone of Shinji’s mom) is learning how to be human – nope, she spontaneously combusts. The characters and situations are making less sense than ever (“the cores that form the eva infinities are the materialization of souls”), but this is the best the show has ever looked. Shinji finally fights vs. his dad in identical evas in the anti-universe, then rewrites the world as a new place (“neon genesis”) where he won’t have to pilot no more giant robots.

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China III (1992, Tsui Hark)

Set in Beijing leading up to a grand lion king dance event. For a friendly sporting competition, a lot of guys sure get set on fire or catch spears through the chest. Focus is less on individual kung-fu, more on lion-head spectacle, though enemy-turned-ally Clubfoot (Xiong Xinxin, villain of The Blade) is the breakout star of the former. The comedy and romance get pretty bad – in fact anything that isn’t a lion-head dance is wasted time, and Foon is the worst offender. The photography is sharper than ever though, especially when Rosamund is around, and there’s some good shadowplay. Rosamund’s Russian motion-picture supplier turns out to be an assassin, caught in the act by his own tech.

New stunt coordinator Yuen Bun did Dragon Inn and the Royal Tramp movies the same year, later went on to work with Johnnie To on greats like Throw Down and Sparrow. Interesting to hear Tsui in the blu extras complain about lack of originality in modern film – everyone studies the same references and produces the same movies.

by ·Comments Off on Executioners (1993, Johnnie To & Ching Siu-Tung)

A quickie follow-up to Heroic Trio codirected by the Chinese Ghost Story guy. Nothing but commercial fluff. I’m not angry about it – Criterion can do whatever they want, and I got to see another Johnnie To movie in nice HD.

In the post-apocalyptic future, Maggie Cheung is a water thief and bounty hunter, Michelle Yeoh is working with the mad scientist trying to revive the supply of fresh water, and Anita Mui is retired with a kid and a politician husband (Paul Chun of Peking Opera Blues). But when the idiot police bring a freshly-captured killer to a press conference with the President (Guan Shan of A Better Tomorrow II) without checking him for bombs first, Anita’s husband is murdered and she’s thrown in jail. Maggie takes care of the kid – the two whiniest characters adventuring together with her rival Mad Detective, who she decides she loves ten seconds before he’s crushed by an underwater gate. Takeshi Kaneshiro’s debut as a charismatic pretty boy used as an expendable publicity tool for the mad scientist. Anthony Wong can’t be seen in this movie since he died so hard in part one, so he plays every deformed masked character. Anita finally breaks out of jail, regaining her powers, and takes on the evil inventor Kim, who was really hoarding fresh water while pretending to be providing it. He accidentally blows up his own iron-fisted superfighter with a grenade crossbow, then extremely kills Yeoh, then gets blow’d up.

Lau “Mad Detective” Ching-wan and Maggie:

Yeoh:

R. Emmet Sweeney for Metrograph:

With Executioners, Ching and To pivot from postmodern comic book to survivalist Mad Max paranoia. They turn the fears and anxieties over 1997 up to 11, detonate a nuclear bomb, and let the trio live in a post-apocalyptic state where most of the drinking water has been poisoned by radiation and survivors are at war for what remains. To claims the sequel was only made to cover the cost overruns of the first movie: “The reason why we produced the second one was because the budget for the first one was very high and we needed to make two films to cover the whole production cost.” Executioners is perhaps more of an accounting trick than a movie, but though it is heavy on exposition it also features moments of crazed creativity — such as Anthony Wong’s unhinged performance as an operatically depressed monster who conspires with the police to hoard water and who keeps the severed head of his unrequited lover (Takeshi Kaneshiro) in a sumptuously appointed leather box.

Anthony:

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China II (1992, Tsui Hark)

Jet Li and Rosamund Kwan are back, taking vacation with Foon (now played by Max Mok, Sammo’s buddy in Pedicab Driver), apparently with no hard feelings after Foon teamed up with the disruptive Iron Vest in part one. Strange for this episode to be the follow-up, since the first one begins with Wong Fei-hung wishing to expel all foreigners, and here his enemy is a violent flaming-arrow-shooting cult which wishes to… expel all foreigners. Kidnapping Rosamund for owning a camera and burning down Jet’s medical conference are direct attacks, true.

The baddest-ass fighter isn’t even a cult member (though the cult’s bulletproof mystic is pretty good, played by Jet’s stunt double), it’s a cop who’s happy to play-fight Wong but won’t help out the children the cult is trying to murder. The cop is Donnie Yen in his breakout year, with Tsui casting him in this and the Dragon Inn remake. Both these guys die in the end, after some magical wire work, as does friendly David Chiang (the dandy of Boxer from Shantung), but beloved Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen (Zhang Tielin of The Magic Crane) escapes safely to begin his revolution.

In the extras, Yen casually refers to himself as “the ultimate martial arts opponent for Jet Li” and explains the difference between being a great martial artist and a great martial arts actor.

by ·Comments Off on Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012, John Hyams)

There’s this idea going around on Vulgar Auteurism Twitter that some godforsaken JCVD/Dolph Lundgren action series got revived in the 2010s by the son of the director of Timecop, starring the 12th-billed actor in Expendables 2, as a straight-to-video 3D (?) fifth sequel shot entirely in nondescript strip-mall locations, and it was actually great. Still buzzed off The Doom Generation, I watched it to set the record straight, and it was actually great.

Not a normal DTV sequel – dank Damon Packard vibes, the scenes linger weirdly, the strobe effects more intense. Apparently I was supposed to watch Regeneration first to make any sense out of this. Scott Adkins’ family is killed in first-person oner-cam by culty home invaders. Evil plumber Magnus is freed by Dolph Lundgren in a red Mario hat, prompting a strobey JCVD appearance in a strip club bathroom and a full-house slaughter. Scott Adkins finally comes alive and destroys the plumber, then meets mystery woman Mariah Bonner and another Scott Adkins who works for JCVD, and learns we’re all clones who never had families. Murderous rages are flown into, everyone dies.

Daniel Goldhaber decodes it: “A movie about a man trapped inside of a genre movie, programmed with a stock motivation.” More from Josephine and Josh.